Caddo Mounds Teacher’s Workshop

Posted by MYETX

Alto, Texas- Caddo Mounds State Historic Site (SHS) is offering a Caddo traditions-themed workshop on July 23-25, 2016. The Caddo Mounds SHS is an approved continuing professional educational (CPE) provider for the Texas Education Agency. The intended audience for this workshop is Texas Social Studies, Language Arts, and Fine Arts K-12 teachers.

Workshop sessions will:

Provide teachers with a unique opportunity to learn about traditional Caddo lifeways from Caddo nation members and Caddo scholars.

Invite teachers and Caddo tribal members “to the table” for a dialogue about how to respectfully include indigenous topics in classroom curriculum.

Create opportunities for teachers to brainstorm with their peers and develop lesson plans for using workshop content in their classrooms.

Provide an opportunity for teachers to participate in a workshop-based social media project.

Allow participants to earn three full days of TEA-approved CPE credits.

The Caddo have been absent from East Texas since their forced relocation to the Brazos River reservations in the early 1840s, and absent from Texas as a cultural group since their removal from the state in 1859. Today, the tribal headquarters for the Caddo Nation is in Binger, Oklahoma. Because of the Caddo’s earlier presence in East Texas, the Spanish who traveled to this area named it Tejas (Texas) after the Caddo people who lived here. Inviting Caddo tribal members back to CMSHS, a sacred place for their ancestors, will provide a powerful setting for Texas teachers to learn about Texas history and Caddo traditions. Workshop sessions will offer opportunities for participating teachers to learn about and try their hand at pottery making, house building, archery, cooking, weaving, storytelling, and dance. In addition, teachers will participate in a round table discussion with Caddo tribal members about “best practices” for teaching indigenous topics.

To ensure that participating teachers will leave with concrete plans for how they can integrate what they learned into their classrooms, there will be an afternoon session reserved for brainstorming and the creation of lesson plans.

Teachers will be encouraged to participate in a photo/social media project during the workshop and after their return to their classrooms. For the first part of this social media project teachers will be asked to take pictures of the workshop experiences that they find meaningful and potentially useful for lesson planning. Teachers will then be asked to share those images on Instagram with the hashtag #caddotraditions. For the second part of this project, participating teachers and their students will be asked to share images of their Caddo-based lessons and projects with the hashtag #caddoclassroom.